take the pieces and build them skywards

Main menu

Post navigation

Identify?

Once when I was in hospital, a doctor (or nurse, or someone, I don’t recall exactly, I was ill) asked whether I “identify” with my bipolar diagnosis. Later that week someone else said “I can see your diagnosis is something you really identify with.”

I have really mixed feelings about what it means to “identify” with a diagnosis. I know that psychiatry is not an exact science, so there is guess-work and a subjective sense of what fits where, and how. So yes, in a sense, I do identify with the diagnosis of bipolar. I recognise in myself the highs and lows, the behaviours, thoughts and attitudes that come with them. Textbook. And the acknowledgement of this, of my recognition, brings some positive results with it: more helpful prescriptions, a framework for treatment, and (the usefulness of this is underestimated) a logic within which others can read me.

On another hand, even if psychiatry is aiming at a pinata in the dark and hoping for a lucky strike, I’m not sure a diagnosis should be something you “identify” or “don’t identify” with. Certainly, I can say when something doesn’t feel right to me. If someone diagnoses me with an illness whose symptoms I cannot recognise in myself, I can definitely make the case for this not being my diagnosis. This will hopefully lead to the results I mentioned above, re: treatment.

But some people don’t “identify” with their diagnosis- nor do they necessarily identify with any. The pressure to hammer square symptoms into the round holes of diagnoses can lead to counterproductive outcomes. For example: over-diagnosis of some conditions because some of the symptoms fit for many people and there’s nowhere else to put them; diagnosing people with an illness of which they have only one or two symptoms; abandoning hope for some people, assuming that their lack of place within the rigid structures available means that they have no illness at all (and that because of this, the symptoms of the now-non-illness need not be taken seriously anymore). Not everyone “identifies” with a diagnosis, but that doesn’t mean nothing is wrong.

In addition, while I understand that psychiatry is inexact and sometimes a blunt tool for a fine operation, I think if you are going to use something as medical-sounding as “diagnoses”, you can’t afford to put that much emphasis on “identification.” Nobody “identifies” as having a physical health condition. And no, physical and mental health conditions are not the same- despite what people say, they are often not even similar- but if you are using the same language, giving the same weight to the same words, you need to have something behind those words. Something that doesn’t just depend on whether someone “feels” like you might be right.

I know I have written before about how I “have” rather than “am” bipolar. It might not seem like an important distinction, but the point I was making at that time was that recognising the signs and symptoms of an illness within yourself, doesn’t mean that these define you. They may be important and have a big effect on shaping who you are, but this doesn’t mean that they are all you are. The diagnosis, the illness, isn’t necessarily intrinsic. But something not being an identity in and of itself, doesn’t mean that it isn’t tangible in real terms. For example, I don’t think of myself as “identifying” as a lesbian. I just am one. It’s not something I picked and chose to call mine, like being a goth or an emo or a banana or whatever. It’s something I consider intrinsic and ingrained, which would exist regardless of my own understanding of it (whether cultural or personal). In the same way, I don’t think bipolar is something I “identify” with. It’s something I think explains a lot of my symptoms, and for me it is a useful framework to work within. However, this exactly the reason that I don’t think of it as something I identify with. I have it, or I don’t. The diagnosis is useful to me, or it isn’t. The language of identification doesn’t belong in medicine of any kind. Not from the same people who, when you “identify” as mentally healthy, take this to be a symptom of your illness. No. You can’t identify your way in or out of a problem.

One thought on “Identify?”

Whenever I’m in doubt about questions like this, I switch the mental illness to a physical one, so for example “Do you identify with your cancer diagnosis?” Which sounds stupid, and so I don’t fret too much about the answer because the question itself is poorly designed.

It’s the same with “I have [diagnosis]” and “I am [diagnosis]” – nobody would say “I am MS” “I am leukaemia” “I am cystic fibrosis” so I will never say that I am bipolar or I am borderline. I have these diagnoses, I suffer from these illnesses but I am not my illnesses. We choose how far our diagnoses define us and that’s a totally individual choice.